Earth unrecognizable by 2050

Originally posted by dadudemon
IMO, I think a super pathogen will hit before long. As I've gone on about before, a weaponized form of Rabies is the best candidate for the greatest amount of death...considering there's been only 1 or 2 survivors from full on rabies (and they were vegetables.) The way we survive it now is through mitigation of the actual infection. Weaponized when it's peak is realized within a day or two instead of weeks? Yeah, that's a lot of death and we would have ourselves a virtual "zombie" apocalypse similar to the Rage virus.

I searched and searched and it was the only virus that had a 100% death rate...if left untreated. Others did not even come close with up to 90% untreated death rate being seen (like a strain of Ebola.)

The lung disease from the Black Death, had a estimated death rate of 100% as well. Granted, it didn't spread so quickly because it killed it's victims within 48 hours.

Originally posted by dadudemon
As I've gone on about before, a weaponized form of Rabies is the best candidate for the greatest amount of death...considering there's been only 1 or 2 survivors from full on rabies (and they were vegetables.) Weaponized when it's peak is realized within a day or two instead of weeks?

Deadliness is only one metric for picking a plague virus. Getting it to kill fast gets you the burnout problem. At the extreme it can "burn" though its hosts faster than it can effectively spread. In practice it doesn't have to be that fast since deliberate quarantine measure can be enacted.

For a plague spread from person to person to be effective it has to remain unobvious and infectious for a good portion of its life cycle. While rabies is very deadly it has the problem of the worst method of spreading (bites from mammals) and produces victims with very obvious problems.

Originally posted by Robtard
There's an easy fix with the 'feeding the growing population of poor countries'; it's called Soylent Green. /thread

What?...Show them 1970's sci-fi movies until they die?

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Deadliness is only one metric for picking a plague virus. Getting it to kill fast gets you the burnout problem. At the extreme it can "burn" though its hosts faster than it can effectively spread. In practice it doesn't have to be that fast since deliberate quarantine measure can be enacted.

For a plague spread from person to person to be effective it has to remain unobvious and infectious for a good portion of its life cycle. While rabies is very deadly it has the problem of the worst method of spreading (bites from mammals) and produces victims with very obvious problems.

Agreed with the above, from what I was told concerning the Bubonic Plague it's high spread was a result of the time it toke for people to feel the infection in which time they still carried the disease. IIRC 80% of the infected died, but they only did so after several days in which they had plenty of time to spread the disease to other people. It killed 1/3 to 1/2 of a much less dens populated Europe and that wasn't even iirc airborn. I know the sociaty today are different etc. but if we are hit by something akin to the above (lets imagine a bactaria, immune to our antibiotic as a result of prolonged exposiure to the various forms of biotics from modern Agricultural swine production) I think it'll get really, really nasty.

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
World economies will not be able to whistand the high oil prices, especially ours. Given that almost all farm equipment (in the western world) runs on diesel and what do you think will happen to food prices?

That's easy to answer and address: The already proven bio-diesel that can be grown from a microbe will "magically" become easier to implement at treatment plants, eliminating our dependency on petro-derived diesel.

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
Alternative fuels are simply decades away from any type of large scale implementation.

Wrong. If by decades away, you mean that in the past tense (as in, they could have been implemented decades ago), you'd be correct.

As fact, it would take less than 2 years to build out a super-system of hydrogen fueling stations and have one at the very least, every two miles of every highway in America. That includes places like "no one in town" Montana and Alaska, too. I posted about this, in another thread, already. The total cost, I believe, was only $2 billion. That did not take into the account the "breakthrough" solar-powered hydrogen making shoe-box machine that costs less than $500, in every single damn home in America. There's also the easy to implement microbe diesel solution. It would cost a little less than $2 million for each treatment plant, to get the little microbes running.

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
Then there's the fact that the world is running out of enough fresh water both drinking and irrigation.

The "fresh water epidemic" is both a hoax and a lie.

http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2008/MDG_Report_2008_En.pdf#page=44

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
And like the article says...we will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than in the last 8000 to feed everybody.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_pop_totl&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=world+population

The article is simply wrong.

Consider that the previous 40 years contained, on average, 5 billion people. Consider that the average for the previous 40 contained, on average, 2.5 billion. Consider that the previous 40 contained 1.75 billion. Consider that the previous 40 contained 1.35 billion.

Then consider that the next 40 will contain, on average, 8 billion.

Add up the totals for the previous periods I listed (I broke it up, because, there was a geometric growth for a while, so I had to be fair and make the "averages" more "average" without giving a "biased" lean towards the very "latest" previous 40 years.)

10.6 billion.

Compare that to 8 billion.

Already, we see a problem with that. Already, we know that the number is wrong just by going from 2010 to 1840.

Much less the "20 billion" estimated to have been born, lived, and died, before our current 7 billion.

In other words, Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund, is wrong. I have no idea where he got his numbers from. He probably "inflated" his number by the modern "consumerism" fatasses of America. However, we are talking about the largest population growths occurring in the poorest of poor people, which would equate to even less food than the people of the previous 100+ years.

I'm actually quite sure you could have come to the same conclusion without my help. It's just that we are so used to taking "scientists" for their word when they make sweeping statements like those.

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
The earth simply does not have the resources to supply 9 billion humans who want to live the American lifestyle..and yes, everyone wants to drive cars and eat meat.

I agree. Odd that despite me disagreeing with every one of your points, I still agree with the main one.

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
Business as usual? I'd like to make a large bet with you on that but it's very unlikely I'll be around to collect it.

I agree. Our population growth cannot and will not be sustained.

You raise valid points with most of your arguments but given the money and power of the oil cartels I think implementing alternative fuels would be harder than you think.

The water situation is not a hoax, it's not just drinking water
The worlds aquifiers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifier are in decline and they supply most of the water for farming

Food? Well this one IS solvable, if people quit eating meat. More grain can be produced per acre than meat. Problem is people around the world seem to want to eat more meat, not less.

Originally posted by dadudemon
The "fresh water epidemic" is both a hoax and a lie.

http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2008/MDG_Report_2008_En.pdf#page=44

Huh, I bought into that one.

Related factoid: The US (alone) gets enough freshwater everyday in rainfall to provide more than 4500 gallons of water per person in the world even if we reached a population of ten billion. Even if 99.9% is lost to farming, the purification process, or lack of collection area there's plenty to go around if an effort is made.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Huh, I bought into that one.

I'm always skeptical of any "crises" the pop-up or are whined about. Usually, there's more "truth" than is being told. Not a conspiracy, but it "grabs" attention if it's called a "Crisis."

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Related factoid: The US (alone) gets enough freshwater everyday in rainfall to provide more than 4500 gallons of water per person in the world even if we reached a population of ten billion. Even if 99.9% is lost to farming, the purification process, or lack of collection area there's plenty to go around if an effort is made.

That's pretty cool.

I also think that we could easily turn seawater into drinking water, in no time, with little money. In fact, we do that already. The fact that the "water crisis" fails to acknowledge that almost makes the "water crisis" criers, laughable. Some could say, "But, no major efforts are being made." Do you honestly think that we would allow hundreds of millions of industrialized citizens die of dehydration before we "put up" just a few hundred more desalination plants in each country? We already have well over 12,000 in place, already. Additionally, the Middle East already makes and used something like 70% of all the desalinated water. Surely their old technology could easily be implemented to other nations in a very short period of time. 😉

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
You raise valid points with most of your arguments but given the money and power of the oil cartels I think implementing alternative fuels would be harder than you think.

I fully agree with this statement.

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
The water situation is not a hoax, it's not just drinking water
The worlds aquifiers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifier are in decline and they supply most of the water for farming

It's a hoax because more "clean" water is reaching everyone than ever before. The amount of clean water we have reaching people is greater now, per capita, than it was just as little as 20...no, even 10 years ago.

For a "crisis", we are certainly purifying/desalinating/distilling more water than ever before. In fact, as the link provided, we will continue on our upwards trend until "good" water is penetrating every country/clime/people. (99%+)

Originally posted by The Dark Cloud
Food? Well this one IS solvable, if people quit eating meat. More grain can be produced per acre than meat. Problem is people around the world seem to want to eat more meat, not less.

That probably has a little something to do with our species evolving off of a diet comprised with 60-80% of meat calories. It's kind of "in our genes" to eat meat.

If the "grow or print meat" points I brought up, are explored, in the future, the meat issue will not be an issue, either. lol

Can you imagine? Going up to a vending maching, ordering food, and then it prints your food for you? hahaha That thought of it makes it seem like a Star Trek replicator.